Brian

Posts by Brian

About a year ago, I ditched my key ring and went to Keyport V01. Since then I’ve been using it religiously, my only change being the addition of the swivel cap which became available a few months after my original purchase, which made Keyport a bit easier to use with a key fob. Keyport V01 was so awesome I purchased one as father’s day present (and it’s still in use) and sold a few friends on them as well, to say nothing of its conversation starter abilities.

So when I heard Keyport was making a 2.0 version on Kickstarter, I couldn’t jump on the project fast enough. Keyport 2.0 remains compatible with the exact same set of blades (keys) as the first version, making it an easy upgrade from the V01 edition. What’s different is pretty simple: Keyport 2.0 is manufactured from plastic instead of metal, making it lighter and hopefully more resistant to denting when dropped, cheaper, has a new mechanism locking the top cap on, offers smoother sliding action, and comes with a swivel by default. It has slightly different dimensions but retains the same thickness.

@nerdtalker Great, glad you like it! Same thickness, slightly shorter, but a bit wider to fit the removable side plates.

The change in width is a noticeable at first, but it’s there to accommodate the removable sliding side plates which come in a few different colors. What’s really evident is the big change in weight, which is perhaps the biggest improvement for those looking to upgrade from the V01 to 2.0. The change in width might make it difficult to use in some vehicles with clearance issues already, but it’s minimal.

Initially I was a bit surprised that Keyport would want to ditch metal in favor of plastic (or polymer, if you’re sugar coating things) but the difference allows Keyport 2.0 to be so much less noticeable in the pocket. Likewise the change from metal to polymer seems to make the slider action much smoother. Previously my only gripe with Keyport V01 was that after you got a bit of pocket lint in the action, sliding out the lesser often used blades resulted in a gritty feeling and some sticking and chattering. With 2.0 it seems that the plastic on plastic interface results in much smoother movement, and there’s a bit more play instead of the somewhat tight fit of the previous model. The cap on 2.0 also locks in place while blade number one is fully retracted, making it less likely that dropping Keyport will result in the cap popping off and dumping your blades out.

While the 2.0 model doesn’t fundamentally change anything about the system (it’s still 6 keys total), the improvements made to fit, finish, weight, and of course the slider are arguably worth the difference. Either way I definitely can’t go back to a normal set of keys.

First, I have to note that I love Dropbox. I’ve been using the service almost since the beginning to synchronize my work across multiple desktops, notebooks, and mobile devices. There’s really no alternative at this point that rivals Dropbox in my mind.

That said, the state of their camera upload organization is abysmal. This is a recent new emphasis for Dropbox, automatically uploading all the photos taken on a mobile device or onboard an SD card inserted into a notebook. The problem is that all of these photos are dumped into the same /Dropbox/Camera Uploads folder, so you end up with a huge list of photos. That’s not so bad, except that in my case I’m dealing with sample photos taken on multiple devices for testing results in a completely unwieldy directory with so many files that it often causes Finder on OS X or Explorer on Windows to stall for seconds upon opening.

This isn’t that well organized…

I’ve pleaded my case for a simple feature to be added – per device folder creation. This didn’t make it into the last update, and about a week or so ago I wrote a script to do exactly that. It parses the EXIF data, and sorts photos into a folder with name /[type]+[model]. The end result looks like this:

Finally, some per-device sorting

It’s called EXIFmover and I stuck it up on Github as a Gist since it’s pretty simple. I use Python 2.7 personally, so that’s what this is tailored for. I’ve tested on OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu. Python’s OS interface is fairly platform agnostic. The one prerequesite is EXIF-Py for parsing the EXIF metadata from photos, which can be obtained from that project’s Github page.

Stick both EXIFmover.py and EXIF.py in the Camera Uploads directory, and run. As more files are uploaded, this can be run again and photos will be sorted once more.

I’ve made a habit of only ever looking at signal level in numerics on iOS since the iPhone 3GS days. This has paid off a few times in the past (notably the iPhone 4 antenna situation) but in general just gives a better perspective for network conditions. I regularly post screenshots with both cellular and WiFi in numerics instead of the default bars, and on iOS this is pretty simple to make happen, at least to the cellular signal level indicator, without jailbreaking.

To do this the basic workflow is to enter FieldTest.app, then force quit the application. When FieldTest launches, it changes a .plist file for springboard which controls whether numerics are being shown for cellular signal. This is exactly the file that SBSettings tweaks if you’re toggling “Numeric GSM” and “Numeric WiFi.” I should note that these settings also stay around across iOS restores. Anyhow a lot of people have been asking on Twitter lately for some reason how to make this happen, so I thought I’d write it up.

Dialer for FieldTest (left), FieldTest.app (right)

Anyhow to show cellular signal without using SBSettings:

Launch FieldTest.app by going into the dialer and dialing *3001#12345#*

Hold down standby/lock like you’re going to turn the phone off

Release standby/lock after the power off slider appears, then hold home (this is force quit on iOS – it’s impressive so few people know it)

Boom, you have numerics instead of bars

This can now be tapped to switch back and forth. Launching FieldTest again and quitting will restore the file however, so every time you quit this will have to be a force quit to preserve the setting without jailbreaking or restoring an iOS backup with the plist file set how you want it.

I should also note that on LTE this number is RSRP (Reference Signal Received Power) in units of dBm. On WCDMA this is RSCP (Received Signal Code Power) in dBm, and on CDMA2000 1x/EVDO this is RSSI I believe (or EC, I haven’t ever carried a CDMA2000 iPhone for an apreciable amount of time). On WCDMA and 1x/EVDO values between -50 and -113 dBm are typical, with -50 being at cell center and -113 dBm being at cell edge. On LTE because the iDevice is showing RSRP, values between -75 and -120 dBm are typical, with RSRP showing ~20 dB lower than the analogous RSCP/WCDMA-land signal if you’re trying to compare.

Update/Note: In iOS 7 the signal bars were changed to dots, but the trick still works. Although switching into numerals by force quitting Field Test still works, sometimes it takes a few tries before it works. I’m not sure why that is, but keep force quitting or try quitting and coming back and force quitting again and eventually you’ll switch over.

It has been what seems like an eternity since I wrote a bit about Verizon 4G LTE coming to Tucson, AZ. Since then, the network has been deployed and working just fine, and made it into my mental take-it-for-granted state. Since then, Cricket has lit up their own LTE network on AWS (1700/2100 MHz), and next up is AT&T who just recently announced details about their LTE deployment for a bunch of markets before the end of this calendar year. I wrote about the AT&T LTE news at a high level at AnandTech, and the announcement comes a not-so-coincidentally timed week before the next iPhone announcement in an attempt to prevent lots and lots of LTE related churn.

I’m burying the lead a bit, but before the end of 2012 AT&T will have LTE finally lit up in my part of the world. There’s a relevant press release here which is relatively light on detail – there’s no outline for what parts of town will get LTE, whether it will include surrounding areas, or any further detail. I guess we can only hope that they mean the greater metro area. I’ve asked a few of my sources for a better timeline, but can only say that before December LTE should be lit up.

I hope it goes without saying, but LTE (3GPP Long Term Evolution) is completely different from the earlier announcements AT&T made about “4G” coming to Tucson in May 2011. That was really just deployment of HSPA+ with up to 16QAM on the downlink (HSDPA 14.4) and some additional WCDMA carriers for capacity reasons. I’m pretty pleased with the state of AT&T WCDMA in town, I see around 2-3 carriers on PCS (1900 MHz) around town and what I consider very good peak speeds.

AT&T Spectrum Holdings in Pima County (As of Sept. 7 2012)

Since AT&T LTE doesn’t use the same channel bandwidth everywhere, it’s worth noting that in this particular market (Pima County), AT&T can run 10 MHz FDD-LTE on Band 17, (Lower 700 MHz B+C blocks) and 5 MHz FDD-LTE on AWS (1700/2100) when the time arises. I haven’t seen AT&T enable any LTE on AWS quite yet, this is likely coming at some future date after the rollout is closer to completion or as a way to mitigate loading in the future.

For the longest time, the number of keys on my keychain seemed to be growing out of control. I couldn’t really figure it out, but it was to the point that I had a carabiner and multiple rings to contain all the keys I somehow was accumulating. Then it occurred to me that I didn’t really need all those keys every day – just the few that I use on a day to day basis, then the rest could be stored and used when necessary. I had seen Keyport a few times before, including on the very popular every day carry blog, but something about going through the process didn’t seem worthwhile when a move between houses was looming and my future was relatively nebulous. Recently however, while thinking of an ideal Father’s day present, stumbled on a coupon code for the Keyport and decided I’d order two – one as the gift, another for myself just to see how it goes.

The order process is pretty simple. After picking out the desired Keyport color, number of keys, and accessories (I went with a USB drive and bottle opener), you snap photos of the keys on a printed form and write down markings on the keys. The bits can be blanked out in photoshop, all that needs make it are the head, shaft, and both sides. These then get sent off so Keyport can ship back the appropriate blanks. I had two keys which Keyport couldn’t mail blanks for – a US Post Office box key (which was expected), and my locking gas cap key (which looks incredibly generic). For these, one needs to either ship the key in for Keyport to cut the head off of and turn into a keyport key (in the case of the post office key), or properly identify. I ended up with the following codes:

After a while, the Keyport comes in the above tin with some documentation, along with your blanks. The interesting part of the key blanks is that it appears that Keyport simply cuts the heads off of blanks themselves. If you look closely at the blanks, it’s pretty obvious that they use a bandsaw or something, then mate them up with the plastic Keyport insert. Nothing wrong with this, just an interesting note.

After you get the blanks back, it’s then a matter of finding a locksmith who will cut the keys. There’s a list of approved locksmiths from Keyport, however there weren’t any down in Tucson, AZ. Since there’s really only one go at getting the blanks cut (without paying money and ordering more), getting a good cut is key, and I worried that Ace or Home Depot might mess things up, especially after having a few keys cut at Home Depot that needed to be re-cut. I ended up going to Bruce’s Lock Shop on Broadway, who had no problem with the blanks, and charged just $2 for my 4 keys. All of my keys worked perfectly in their respective locks – phew!

Of particular interest is the chipped car key, which comes along with a plastic insert (for you to stick a loyalty club barcode on) and the transponder chip at the end. Both of the relevant vehicles I ordered car keys for support onboard programming, which is simple – you insert the original OEM keys one after the other, then the third key you want added to the ECU, and boom, it works. How this goes is largely a function of your car, of course.

The other difficulty with the car key is that you must make sure you have adequate clearance around the keyhole for the whole Keyport to rotate, a little over a 1″ diameter circle. In addition, this means that the middle two Keyport slots basically must be dedicated to the car key and transponder / barcode insert, so the turning radius is minimized. I have no problem with clearance or turning the Keyport in my 2005 F-150, though it is tight. I also worried about whether a Keyport full of keys would be heavy enough to cause concern about wearing the car’s key slot on the steering column, and thankfully it seems light enough that I’m not worried about damage happening.

The rest of the keys for me were very simple and turn in their respective tumblers just fine. If you have a particularly torquey lock, however, I could see how Keyport might not handle it. The documentation supplied with the box notes a design torque of up to 20 inch-lbs, and that most locks only require 1-3 inch-lbs. I can see how this is a very big design concern, since you’re no longer just torquing the metal head of a key, but instead this large assembly.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with how things turned out, and the end result is that I no longer have a huge carabiner of keys poking me in the leg or taking up space in my pocket that could be otherwise used for additional smartphones. I still have to get the second set cut, but don’t expect any problems since it’s largely the same set of keys.

As the smartphone space becomes increasingly commoditized, the obvious next step is to make hardware choice a function of ecosystem choice. That’s already happened for some of the obvious features (marketplaces for music, video, and books), but the next step is delivering ecosystem-specific features for core phone functionality. Probably one of the features I use the most on a device is messaging, and since iMessage is nearly a year old, I couldn’t help but think more about why I feel a back-of-my-mind longing for it whenever I go back to a device that’s strictly SMS. Also, a recent influx of weird SMS issues I encountered while chatting with a friend prompted both a twitter rant and me deciding to finally get all of this down somewhere.

So here’s a simple bulleted list about some of the things I don’t miss about SMS:

Split messages at the 160 character limit

The caveat here is that some carriers do indeed properly concatenate messages, but this usually only works if both sender and recipient are on the same carrier. The Verizon -> AT&T exchange used to properly implement this, back when the CDMA iPhone 4 came out, but it later was broken and inexplicably never fixed. Part of me wonders whether iMessage wasn’t spawned partially because of this annoyance.

Messages arriving out of order, sometimes as a result of the split from the character limit

This is a continual annoyance, there’s no greater way to break the flow of a conversation than by having replies arrive completely out of order. Also SMS is predominantly circuit switched, and not an IP based protocol. Obviously BBM/iMessage just work over the internet, and aren’t tied to having a working cellular session.

No delivery guarantee, SMS is best effort delivery only

Duplicate SMSes as a result of carriers implementing proprietary systems to mitigate SMS’ best effort delivery system

Verizon seems to be particularly aggressive about this. I still would like to know more about just how their system determines when to re-send a particular SMS, but I sometimes get 3 or 4 of the same SMS from Verizon subs.

No read reports or delivery status reports (at least on most new smartphone OSes that don’t implement SMS delivery receipts)

Delivery reports are actually a pretty common feature for SMS (usually just uses a prefix), but implementation varies from carrier to carrier and is a big mess. I suspect this is the reason smartphone platforms tend to implement it at random, if at all.

Delivery time is sometimes very long depending on SMSC load

Try getting an SMS delivered on New Years, I dare you.

Image sizes are smaller and more compressed for MMS, different for each carrier and up to the exchange to accommodate and tailor to sizes

This is set on iOS in the carrier bundle

iMessage can deliver full quality images if both sender and recipient are on WiFi

The price of an SMS

$0.11 per message is downright absurd

RIM understood the importance of having a platform-specific messaging product with BBM, specifically in both the platform lock-in and loyalty that this kind of feature adds. There’s a certain amount of potential energy that it takes to overcome both this messaging tie-in when switching platforms, and users can readily identify the differences. Apple clearly got this and delivered with iMessage, and I expect that having a messaging platform that spans the smartphone, tablet, and desktop will make that potential energy to escape to another ecosystem even harder to overcome. There’s a certain message or conversational velocity that makes BBM and iMessage feel entirely different from traditional IM, yet faster than the sometimes minute-delayed SMS.

Currently Google’s messaging “product” is Google Chat, but the acquisition of Meebo and other internal rumblings make me strongly suspect that a more cohesive and mobile-oriented messaging product with the same BBM/iMessage like conversational velocity is coming, maybe even at Google I/O 2012. There’s so much at work here which both shifts the balance of power away from the carriers and also makes the whole messaging experience better by sharing it with the tablet and desktop.

Previously I posted about the EXIF data present in Apple’s untouched, straight-from-the-device iPhone 4S camera samples. Today, I saw that they had done the same thing again by posting original samples of images taken from the iPad. There’s still no original video sample (instead just a compressed one) so unfortunately there’s no telling whether A5X gets a better encoder than the one from A5. I wouldn’t hold my breath, however, as it’ll probably wind up being the same 24 Mbps H.264 baseline with 1 reference frame.

Like before, Apple has left the EXIF data intact on its samples, including the geotagging data for a surprising number. I think it’s interesting to just take a look.

Like last time I’ve reproduced the entire EXIF output using the ever-awesome exiftool, or you can do the same thing (which uses it as a backend) on exifdata.com. It’s the same data just presented in a nicer fashion online (and with a link to google maps).

So a couple things immediately stand out which I’ve bolded. First, the model of the device reflects Apple’s new naming scheme, and reports simply “iPad.” There’s no 3 or “Late 2012″ or any other moniker, which should further confirm (if it’s even possible to more strongly confirm) that the name of the thing is literally just “iPad.” The software this iPad was running is iOS 5.1, which makes sense. Image size is 2592×1936 which works out to exactly 5.01 MP as well – the original iPhone 4 also produced images 2592×1936 in size, in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same OmniVision CMOS being shared between the 4 and iPad (3rd Gen).

Moving on we also see that the focal length and field of view reported in EXIF data are exactly the same as those from the iPhone 4S. This does seem to back the claim that the iPad 3rd Gen is indeed using the same optical system/module as the iPhone 4S, at least superficially. Further, this means that the two must be using the same size sensor to achieve the same field of view with the same 4.3mm focal length.

Update: This ended up being the case, as the iPad (3) uses the same CMOS as the iPhone 4 (as predicted), which is OmniVision’s OV5650. That sensor has 1/3.2″ size and 1.75µm pixels. Recall that the iPhone 4S uses Sony’s IMX145 sensor which is 1/3.2″ as well, but with 1.4µm pixels. Using the same optical format is what makes it possible for Apple to reuse the same 5P optical design between the iPhone 4S and iPad (3).

The image is recorded at ISO 80 (which is the lowest I’ve seen the 4S go as well) and at 100% crop looks pretty good, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s mindblowing. There’s some definite noise visible in the sky and some noise-reduction which seems to battle it. Thankfully Apple still isn’t using a sharpening kernel, so there aren’t any halos around the flower’s petals. The lower part of the flower petal also has some oversaturation (100% white). The good part is that it seems to inherit the good optical qualities from the 4S system (same module, different CMOS I guess) and there’s minimal distortion or vignetting, two things that drive me absolutely crazy with most smartphone/tablet camera modules.

Location this photo was taken is Bodega Bay, CA. The photo was also taken on February 16th if the data is to be believed.

Image 2 is pretty surreal. First off, it isn’t a jpg (which is why I’ve added the extensions to these headings) but is rather a png. I’m not sure whether this was just an honest mistake, but something is really weird here and the image obviously didn’t come in this extension or format directly from an iPad.

The Microsoft and HP lines above are just talking about the ICC profile and header attached to the image. It’s an sRGB 1998 ICC profile, and there are CMM type fields (Lino) and others. I would suspect that this image was put through some software with a color management system which saved this information in the headers, and the person saving it chose PNG to not introduce more JPEG artifacts by re-encoding an already lossy-encoded image.

I’m not going to pretend to know exactly what went on here, but it’s fairly obvious the image didn’t come out of camera.app this way…

I didn’t paste the whole output since it’s a lot more of the same as before. Still an iPad running iOS 5.1, same focal length, field of view, all that good stuff. ISO is still 80 as well.

The location is Martinelli Park near Point Reyes (hence the marking), taken on February 14th, 2012. This is two days before the first image in the set, and very close to it (Bodega Bay and Point Reyes are essentially neighbors, at least based on Google Maps)…

Subjectively this image looks pretty decent, though there is definite blurring and loss of high spatial frequencies in the brown grass at left, though this is a challenging subject and great place to look for any camera to start making things a homogenous mess.

Again there’s no point in republishing all the EXIF data as much of it is the same as before and seems to be valid. ISO is 80 once again.

This photo interestingly enough was captured before all the others, on February 9th, 2012, five days before the third image above. Location this time is Paradise Cove right on the PCH. It’s interesting to me that all the images seem to be of or taken near beaches for some reason.

Final Thoughts

Of the images we can extract EXIF from, all are taken at ISO 80. This is probably no coincidence, as Apple probably wants to stay away from low light performance where basically everything struggles right now even with BSI CMOSes and fast F/2.2 or F/2.4 optics. I guess the beach is a logical choice of scenery to that end since there’s a lot of light (sand is reflective, after all). The photos are from different dates as well, which seems like a risky thing to do when trying to minimize the chances of some crazed tech-paparazzi catching an Apple engineer/exec with an unreleased iDevice snapping photos. With the iPhone 4S we saw a huge variety of different locations spanning California to Yosemite to Germany, whereas the iPad essentially gets a drive up the coast and a week of photos. Read into that what you may.

Obviously the last point is that the iPad 3rd gen’s camera is much improved from the almost universally-derided iPad 2 camera (which borrowed the iPod touch module). It’s interesting to see a move to using the same optical system as the 4S and likely the same CMOS as the 4, though it does make sense to maximize component cross-compatibility and drive up volume.

Motivation

In the course of doing smartphone reviews for AnandTech, I’ve taken a lot of photos for the expressed purpose of comparing camera quality. I don’t have an exact number, but it’s an absurd number of images, and of those, maybe 20% or so actually get published. We reviewed the iPhone 4S and discussed its camera at length in our review, but one of the things that piqued my attention was Apple’s claim that they had were sharing untouched, direct-from-the-iPhone samples online (at the bottom). In case you want all of the images, I’ve uploaded a zip here locally.

What’s interesting is that by default, iOS captures geolocation data on each image capture unless you decline the location services request on initial launch. I was curious to find out just how untouched these images were and whether all the EXIF data was left intact, including the GPS location data. Clearly these photos were taken at places that are either some engineer’s favorite hideouts, or possibly much more. Also, there’s that ever looming question of when they were taken, and whether there’s any chance anyone could’ve seen Apple employees taking photos with an unreleased iDevice at some scenic location.

You can analyze EXIF data in any number of image manipulation packages, and increasingly desktop OSes are exposing this data directly (Finder, Explorer, e.t.c.) but for quick analysis I turned to exifdata.com which does a nice job visualizing everything. Alternatively one can just dump the EXIF data using libraries like the very popular exiftool.

Here’s the dump from one of Apple’s demo images, “IMG_1031.JPG” which is the squirrel photo shown during the announcement event. There’s all the standard data included in the full headers, and you can see specifications such as focal length, exposure time, ISO, model, and the software (iOS 5) used. There are some other fields as well.

SubjectArea I believe corresponds to either where the face detection routine selected an AE/AF target with highest confidence value (most likely to be a face), or where the image was focused using tap to focus. The iPhone 4S also includes some new fields at the very bottom such as 35mm equivalent focal length, field of view, hyperfocal distance (at half this distance, all objects and further meet image plane blur criterion and appear in focus – this half trips people up), and even circle of confusion diameter (blur size/circle of confusion). These values at the very end appear to be specific to the iPhone 4S (and possibly its H4 ISP) and aren’t part of the JEITA EXIF 2.2 specification.

If you look at this data a few things pop out. There really is GPS location data inside, and just like before the iDevice also encodes what direction the phone was pointing (compass data) when the image was captured.

This first photo was captured in Yosemite National Park on August 24th 2011, a full one month and 10 days before its announcement on October 4. Interesting.

I’ve truncated the exported data for this image since the same format as the previous one. Note zero feet above sea level, indeed this checks out.

This photo was taken at goat rock beach on August 29th, five days after the first image, and one month 5 days before the announcement. What’s intense about this image is that if you study the google satellite view enough, then take into account the pointing direction, you can actually see the rock in the photograph.

Upon inspection, we can see this photo was taken also at Yosemite National Park and on August 25th 2011. It seems very likely this was taken by the same person who took the squirrel photo, given the fact that it’s a day later and in the same region in the park – perhaps a camping trip or something?

This image is of a person holding a flower up to the camera showing shallow depth of field and some serious bokeh. The subject is the same as shown in the 1080p video sample Apple provides, and appears to lack GPS data of any kind, but was taken on August 29th.

This image also has no GPS data, which means it possibly was taken by the same iPhone 4S as number 4 (and this user disabled location services for the camera app), or just someone else who was likewise cautious to not include position. This image is a macro of some flowers.

Oddly enough image 4 and image 8 were taken on different days, so this possibly is a different location. That said, the location appears to be the Kendall-Jackson winery right off the 101.

Like the beach photo, this is just up the coast from San Francisco. The photo was taken August 30th as well.

Conclusions

Apple took sample images for its iPhone 4S presentation between the dates of August 24th and August 30th, a little over one month before the public unveiling. It’s interesting to note that had you been fortuitous enough to be in Yosemite National Park on the 24th or 25th, you might have by chance seen an iPhone 4S snapping photos of scenery and squirrels. Other locations near San Francisco seem logical given Apple’s location in Cupertino, CA, leaving the photo from Germany an odd outlier.

It seems that for all the scrutiny placed on bars surrounding 1 infinite loop, being in picturesque locales one month before an iPhone unveiling is quite possibly another logical strategy for spotting an unreleased iPhone.

I have to come full circle and say that I’m impressed Apple really didn’t scrub data from its sample images. This is something even I do to provide some location anonymity in the course of uploading sample images, though as of late I’ve become sloppy with scrubbing all the GPS data from EXIF for each sample image.

A while back, Verizon announced more detail about their plans to bring 4G LTE to the Tucson area. I’ve been paying hyper-close attention to each carrier’s 4G rollout plans in my area, primarily out of personal interest, secondarily because that means when phones launch I won’t have to keep driving to Phoenix to test them. The actual press release is here, if you want to read it. If you want the actual nugget of new information, however, just read this:

The 4G LTE network will extend through Tucson between Interstate 10 and Harrison Road, north to Sunrise Drive and south to Valencia Road, including the Tucson International Airport.

That’s a bit curious actually, since the four thoroughfares specified don’t completely bound a region. Sunrise doesn’t extend all the way to Harrison, and Valencia is a bit discontinuous as well. Further, Interstate 10 bounds the bottom and left side of the box. I spent some time figuring out what that actually looks like, and created a google maps/earth .kmz overlay image, and image.

There’s a bit of interpolation going on here, namely assuming that Ina will bound the north part after Sunrise disappears, and that the jump from Sunrise to Harrison takes place like shown. It gives a decent impression of what the initial profile will be like, however.

A few things immediately stand out. First, there’s a bit of the east side that is genuinely clipped off. Second, south tucson between I-19 and I-10 doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s definitely a part of “Tucson,” yet the bounded region that Verizon stipulates would seem to preclude coverage making it down there. But perhaps the most head-scratchingly surreal part of the box is the fact that coverage will only extend to Sunrise.

Beyond and around the Sunrise/Skyline line is the foothills. This is the region where it makes the most sense to deploy 4G LTE due to the kind of neighborhood it is. Extending only to Skyline (and not even a little beyond) seems like a completely missed opportunity. It’ll be interesting to see the actual coverage profile and when things start rolling out. As of right now, I can confirm that there isn’t 4G LTE anywhere in town – I’ve tested at the airport, downtown, U of A, and throughout town with the HTC Thunderbolt, Pantech UML290, Samsung hotspot, and another unreleased datacard thus far to no avail. Hopefully it comes soon. Verizon has 22 MHz of 700 MHz spectrum (upper c block) in most of Arizona including Phoenix and Tucson. Only the far west part of Arizona has 34 MHz.

Update:

Today Verizon Wireless announced that the Tucson, AZ market will be included in the August 18 nationwide LTE rollout. Last week I heard from a good friend of mine with a Droid Charge that LTE was working in various parts of Tucson already, no doubt as Verizon tests individual eNodeBs for functionality.

Update 2:

At around 10:30 PM on August 17, Verizon 4G LTE went live in Tucson. Some people on Twitter sent me notifications about them seeing the service light up in areas that were even outside the circle painted by earlier press releases, so if you’re reasonably close to the boundary outlined in the press release, there’s a good chance LTE is active in your area.

One person tweeted a link to some speedtests, which show that things are indeed working:

Currently I don’t have any 4G LTE devices, but when I get another one for testing we’ll have a better picture of coverage and speeds in this market.

Update 3:

It’s live, and it’s fast! I’ve tested it thoroughly and published some results already in the context of the Droid Bionic review, which is only a UE Category 2 device. Soon as I get a UE Category 3 LTE device I will run some more tests and get a better picture.

Last time I was in Las Vegas it was for MIX 10 and Windows Phone 7 (back when it included ‘series’ at the end). This time, the reason is CES 2011 with AnandTech and a whole bunch more mobile devices.

I thought it was interesting last time I came that most casino floors in Las Vegas had shockingly poor or non-existant UMTS (3G) coverage on AT&T. I guess I didn’t find it too shocking, since coverage inside buildings in a dense urban environment is probably the most challenging for mobile networks, but it seemed to be a consistent problem. After getting frustrated about 6 hours into my stay, I decided to switch entirely to EDGE for the duration just because of how annoying being constantly handed between GSM/EDGE and UMTS is when you’re trying to do things. For whatever reason, back then I didn’t think to pull up field test on the iPhone 3GS I was currently carrying to see what bands were assigned to which network technology.

Now that I’m back, I decided to check. Thankfully, Apple has restored most if not all of the Field Test data products in iOS 4.2.1, a huge step forward from 4.1 just allowing signal strength in dBm at top left, and a far cry from 4.0 which shipped with no field test whatsoever. To save potential readers some googling, to get here, enter *3001#12345#* from the dialer and hit call – if it hasn’t been removed yet, you’ll get dumped into Field Test on iOS.

In EDGE and tapping on GSM RR Info, it’s immediately obvious why I saw that behavior last time I was here:

ARFCN dictates what channel inside what band we’re on, and 142 just happens to lie inside the GSM 850 band. It’s a number basically used to refer to the FDD pair of frequencies the phone is currently using. You can calculate exactly what frequency downlink and uplink are on with a little math and some reference guide (there’s a good table here), but basically with an ARFCN of 142 we know immediately that GSM/EDGE is on AT&T’s 850 MHz spectrum. Between 128 and 251 is that GSM850 spectrum.

Now, what about UMTS/3G? Enabling 3G (look at how weak that signal is…) and going into UMTS RR info, I saw the following:

Looking at the fields “Downlink Frequency” and “Uplink Frequency” we can see the device’s UARFCN channel numbers. It’s the same thing, but U for UMTS. Again, with a reference aide (read: wikipedia) we can see that UMTS/3G is working in the PCS 1900 MHz band.

Remember that higher frequencies are less effective at propagating through buildings. It’s pretty obvious now why getting good 3G coverage on AT&T is a challenge deep inside a casino in Las Vegas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with putting GSM/EDGE on 850 and UMTS on 1900, it’s just interesting in practice how immediately obvious the difference is walking around. Propagation is a challenge in dense urban environments with lots of people moving around to begin with, I’m sure this doesn’t help in Las Vegas. AT&T promised to put all of its 3G (UMTS) network on the 850 MHz band (wherever it’s licensed to use it) by the end of 2010, but sadly that hasn’t happened quite yet, at least in this market. I’ll keep checking, but thus far it’s been solidly in 1900 PCS. Oh well.

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